Christine Virnig is a children’s author who combines her child development expertise as a former pediatric allergist with her experience working in a
children’s library to craft stories that make kids laugh, scream, and feel
seen. On the fiction side, Christine’s spooky middle grade novels include A
Bite Above the Rest and Phantom Academy. Christine also writes
gross-but-educational middle grade nonfiction, including Dung for Dinner
and Waist-Deep in Dung. Her first picture book launches in 2027. Christine
lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her family, an exorbitant number of dust
bunnies, and one incredibly lazy cat.
PHANTOM ACADEMY
Lindsay Currie’s Scritch Scratch meets The School for Invisible Boys in this fun romp of a middle grade novel about a newly dead boy who faces a spooky new school hiding an unearthly mystery.
After an unlucky collision between a coconut and the top of his head, twelve-year-old Finn not only joins the ranks of the recently deceased, but also becomes the newest student at Phantom Academy, a boarding school for ghosts.
Once Finn gets over the unfairness of still having homework (you’d think being dead would give you a pass, right?), he discovers that life—er, death?—as a ghost isn’t that bad. He’d probably even enjoy it, if not for one thing: students cannot leave Phantom Academy until they graduate. He can’t check on his family. He can’t see his cat. In fact, he can’t leave the Spirit Realm at all.
As his homesickness builds, Finn convinces his new friends they should escape. But finding the way out is harder than he anticipated, especially when their biggest clue mysteriously goes missing. Finn’s not giving up, though, not with his human memories growing fuzzier and fuzzier with time. They just need to find a way through the veil…
A BITE ABOVE THE REST
A boy moves to a Halloween-themed town only to realize there may be more to the tourist trap than meets the eye in this middle grade novel of “thrills and chills in a gloriously goofy setting” (Kirkus Reviews) perfect for fans of The Last Kids on Earth and Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library!
When Caleb’s mom decides they are moving to her childhood home in Wisconsin, Caleb is not thrilled. Moving schools, states, and time zones would be bad enough, but Mom’s hometown is Samhain, a small and ridiculously kitschy place where every day is Halloween.
Caleb is not a fan of Halloween when it only happens once a year, so Halloween-obsessed Samhain is really not the place for him. How is he supposed to cope with kids wearing costumes to school every single day? And how about the fact that the mayor is so committed to the bit that City Hall is only open from sundown to sunup to accommodate his so-called vampirism? Sure enough, Caleb becomes an outcast at school for refusing to play along with the spooky tradition like the other sixth graders. Luckily, he manages to find a friend in fellow misfit Tai, and just in time, because things are getting weird in Samhain…or make that weirder.
But there’s no way the mayor is an actual vampire, and their teacher absolutely cannot really be a werewolf—right? Caleb discovers Samhain is so much stranger than he ever could have imagined. As one of the only people who realizes what’s happening, can he save a town that doesn’t want saving?
Spooky Middle Grade 